Seed Catalog Reading

We trudged through the snow to retrieve our first garden catalog. Excited! So, we wondered what our gardening friends thought of about the best garden vegetables to grow in tiny spaces.  They replied about small spaces and in general.

Garden seed catalogs hold spring’s promise in your hands. These seem to sprout in mailboxes during winter’s depth. In addition to being fun reading on dark winter nights, they help plan springtime seed planting.

Changing How We Garden

We have plenty of space at Winding Pathways to create a big garden, but we decided to grow vegetables on two small garden plots years ago. Their modest size makes them easy to manage, but mostly we wanted to learn how to grow a maximum amount of the best garden vegetables from a small area. Not everyone has large spaces and as people age adapting to how they continue to enjoy a practice, like gardening, is important.

During the 2024 growing season, our gardens produced an amazing amount of food. We saved money by providing ultra-fresh pesticide-free vegetables and enjoyed nearly year-round tasty vegetables.

Readers Share Their Best Garden Vegetables

We asked a few seasoned gardeners what their favorite small space crop is.

Master gardener, Iris Muchmore, has a small backyard garden. Her absolute favorite planting is a Sun Gold Tomato. She points out that tomatoes aren’t really vegetables. They’re a fruit, but most folks consider them a vegetable. “The Sun Gold tomato is indeterminate, tasty, as sweet as candy, and productive. Children love them. One plant will grow up to seven feet tall and produce all the tomatoes a family can eat with some extras for neighbors. In 2024 we enjoyed tomatoes from June until frost from one plant,” she said.

Jackie Hull is a seasoned Virginia gardener. Her favorite vegetables are string beans, both green and yellow. She’s 83 years old and grows beans in large pots on her porch.  “It makes gardening easy. There’s no weeding, only watering and picking,” she remarked.

Tasty high summer garden fruits and vegetables.

Bruce Bachman & Nancy Sauerman buy from Pinetree Garden Seeds in Maine. They comment that their favorite garden vegetable is a “…tie between tomatoes and green beans. Although potatoes, chard, and broccoli are close seconds.”  Then they added with a laugh, “Oh! forgot summer and winter squash! Oops, and okra and spring lettuce.”  All favorites of theirs.

Iowa Gardener, Dave Kramer, responded by stating, “I like the challenge of growing different tomato varieties and growing string beans”

Kurt Rogahn also weighed in, choosing tomatoes as his favorite. “Tomato is my favorite. The ones in the store are so tasteless! I like different varieties— red, yellow, orange, big and small.”

Jill Jones, could hardly decide as she likes just about all vegetables. And, she prepares delicious dishes from her garden produce.

Joann Hoffmann weighed in with these thoughts: She starts greens in a colander!

“I would say my favorite is a nice salad mix with arugula, red lettuce and green lettuce.  You can grow it in a colander.  It’s an early vegetable, likes cool weather.  It makes a great base for salads all summer long.  You can start it in April when it’s too early for other vegetables.  As the season progresses you can add kale, swiss chard, turnup greens, mustard greens, mint, peppermint, tomatoes, cucumbers,  spinach, and cilantro.  Try it and enjoy great tasting salads all summer long!!”

Our Favorite Vegetable For Small Spaces

We’ve gardened for about 50 years, growing all sorts of vegetables, and are constantly experimenting with new varieties. Along the theme of Small spaces” here is our number one favorite:

Swiss Chard:   Chard is a green delicious when steamed or raw in salads. We plant it in April and often eat young leaves within a month. Unlike spinach and lettuce, chard doesn’t bolt, or go to seed,  and get bitter. So, we eat chard from the same clump for about five months without replanting. About two square feet of space produce all the chard we can eat. It’s an outstanding plant for folks who live in apartments and only can grow a few things in pots on the deck.

Susan Fellows is one of those people. “It’s not strong like the greens grown in the South and less strong than spinach.” She enjoys snipping off a few leaves, steaming them, and adding butter. Delicious and nutritious!

Swiss chard is the same species as beet but it’s been developed as a green vegetable. There are several varieties. All are good. Beet tops are also delicious when steamed, but they are a bit stringier and tougher than chard.

Number Two of Best Garden Vegetables

Green and yellow beans are our second favorite for our small space garden.  We use two methods to create a constant harvest from June through October. We plant a small patch of bush beans in May. They produce beans quickly and the plot yields heavily for a month before the plants peter out. Anticipating this, we start another small bean plot several feet away about a month after the first planting. By the time the first plot is done, the second one starts producing like crazy. We also plant a row of pole beans next to a garden fence. They mature slower than bush beans but produce from August until frost. String beans provide great food for nearly every dinner for months.

Promise of spring

Enjoy leafing through winter garden catalogs and place seed orders early in anticipation of delicious 2025 eating.  Be sure to put Sun Gold, string beans, and Swiss chard on the order list.

Some quality seed companies we buy from:

Pinetree Seeds, New Gloucester ME
Seed Savers, Decorah, IA
Gurney’s Seed and Nursery, Greendale, IN
Burpee, Warminster Township, PA
Jung Seeds & Plants, Randolph, WI